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As SADC meets for its annual summit, closed governance, electoral instability, mineral dependency, climate emergencies and weak public participation are limiting Southern Africa’s path to inclusive and sustainable regional development.
By ASHRAF PATEL
Each August, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) regional bloc meets for its annual summit.
This year South Africa is hosting it at Durban International Convention Centre under the theme, “Resilient, sustainable and inclusive industrialisation through infrastructure development, agricultural and critical minerals transformation in pursuit of a just world”.
Unlike South Africa’s Group of Twenty (G20) hosting, where South Africa displayed to the world an open and engaging nation and region, with more vibrant civil society engagement, the SADC summit is impenetrable to public engagement or scrutiny.
For while South Africa went out of its way to promote an open and inclusive G20 spotlight and active Civil 20 (C20) and Social 20 engagement, SADC represents a closed-fortress agenda. The Southern African Peoples Solidarity Network (SAPSN) people’s summit discussions on economic justice, gender and peaceful elections are noteworthy.
The current xenophobia crisis, amidst regional challenges of a lack of economic development, authoritarian regimes, climate disasters and industrialisation, and a lack of an integrated migration strategy with proper support, is deepening our regional polycrisis. The DRC-Rwanda conflicts, as well as the brutal civil war in Sudan, backed by resource-hungry global powers, have opened more wounds of Africa’s resource curse. The Trump tariffs are deepening these, as we have seen in Lesotho’s textile industry, which has retrenched thousands. Swaziland’s repressive monarchical dictatorship stands as a sore thumb in SADC’s agenda of democracy and development.
At the height of the anti-Apartheid movement, SADC and the Commonwealth played a constructive role in the transition towards democracies in South Africa and Namibia. However, over the years, it has become stagnant, with much of its original vision faltering and stagnating. The SADC secretariat and its programmes are mainly donor-funded, which also means it faces the dreaded policy sovereignty problem.
Electoral instability and contestations
With population growth and rapid urbanisation, elections – and access to power – sharpen as the state is viewed as a mechanism for resource distribution.
Mozambique’s 2024 election was riven by mass electoral violence, leading to hundreds of deaths, further fuelled by the oil resource conflicts with extremists in Cabo Delgado. Tanzania’s 2025 election was one of the most contested, leading to several hundred deaths and a brutal crackdown by security forces. Meanwhile, Zambia’s elections this week have also been riddled with accusations of electoral unfairness.
At the epicentre of this is the pandemic of corruption and lack of state capacity to deliver the basics to its citizens. These fuel waves of migration to urban centres in South Africa, thus contributing to the current migration-xenophobia crisis.
In an age of polycrisis, SADC faces its moment of truth: rapid urbanisation and contestation over a new wave of lucrative critical minerals, climate emergencies, civil wars, electoral violence and “great migration” within the region have stretched the capacities of governance and delivery in times of emergencies, with little or no disaster-management capacity.
Critical minerals – the empire’s new clothes?
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In an era of new green industrial and AI economic transformations, advanced and emerging economies are intensifying their pursuit of critical minerals essential for these transitions, as well as in sectors from aerospace to defence, autos and many others. Countries need to build reliable and resilient supply chains to access these minerals in order to maintain their economic and energy security, as well as their competitiveness.
Africa’s vast mineral wealth – accounting for 10.6% of global critical mineral exports – positions it as an increasingly important, though still relatively minor, player in international supply chains. This “paradox of abundance and marginalisation” reflects deeper structural challenges that have long characterised Africa’s relationship with its natural resources.
For African nations, the critical minerals transition provides yet another opportunity for socio-economic transformation. In the mining boom of the 2000s, value was captured by multinational corporations (MNCs) and local political elites and led to the “Dutch Disease” phenomenon, where economic activities were concentrated in a narrow energy sector with few linkages into the economy.
The sobering lessons of the “lost mining decade” have spurred the African Union (AU) to adopt the Africa Mining Vision (AMV) in 2009, a continent-wide vision which diagnosed core challenges of the resource curse problems. The AU’s new Africa Critical Minerals Strategy (ACMS) is noteworthy and has noted with concern the new geopolitical contestations around critical minerals, but can African nations implement the ACMS without a budget?
South Africa’s 2025 Critical Minerals Strategy document defines “criticality” as a mineral’s susceptibility to supply disruptions and the country’s strategic intentions to maximise value or a competitive edge in global supply or value over a (locally) abundant mineral. Key pillars in determining criticality zones and their export significance include recognition of foreign exchange earnings and a healthy balance of payments.
The language is clearly investment-industrial-led and prioritises regulatory reforms to speed up exploration and extraction. This is evidenced in SADC Industrialisation Week 2026, hosted by South Africa’s DTIC, which held a three-day conference with speakers and participants from only government, mining corporations and DFIs. No labour, communities or NGOs in mining communities were invited to participate. This again underscored the challenge that broad-based critical minerals industrialisation faces an uphill battle in the current political economy in Southern Africa.
Decades of the minerals-industrial complex have resulted in uneven development in the region. Botswana – once the “diamond of the region” – faces its severest economic decline as it faces budget deficits amidst the lab-grown diamond boom. Again, SADC programmes have failed to ensure a diversification of economies, which continue to rely on a narrow band of unprocessed mineral exports, susceptible to volatility in commodity markets.
Climate change emergencies and agriculture
As climate crises multiply, the region is at the epicentre of the El Niño wave, from drought in Zimbabwe to floods in Mozambique and northern KZN. In this context, the UN COP 31 and its agenda are vital in a world where oil wars in the Middle East have seen a massive cost-of-living and food inflation, leading to deeper poverty across Africa.
Can the Southern African region develop a genuine people-centred, sustainable development pathway out of the polycrisis?
Ashraf Patel is a senior research associate at the Institute for Global Dialogue (IGD) in South Africa, specialising in global governance, multilateralism, the political economy of the Global South, and developmental and climate justice.
